reviews.metaphorosis.com2 starsThe rebel Kana is challenging Zerika's nascent reign. Khaavren and friends (and his son and his friends) try to save the day.I've previously been a big fan of Brust's writing, but I found The Paths of the Dead, the first part of Brust's Viscount of Adrilankha sub-trilogy, to be almost unreadable. What should have been a one-chapter joke of tortured-but-amusing verbal gymnastics stretched on and on and on. It went quickly from amusing to irritating to painful to tortuous. I finished the book, but had no thought of reading further in the series, no matter how great my interest in the world's history or the characters'.Still, years went by, and I saw this third volume of the sub-trilogy at a discount store. I almost never read books out of sequence, but I've always liked Sethra Lavode, so I thought I'd give it a try. I'm sorry to say that not only has Brust not given up the joke, he seems to have double down on it. The result was just as infuriating as the first time around, and there's remarkably little substance to go with the verbal acrobatics. In fact, it seems the plot is more a vehicle for the word games than the main intent.Others have claimed that Brust is consciously emulating Dumas' The Three Musketeers, and in fact the tone and the structure (a trilogy in which the final volume is so massive that it is broken down into smaller books) are similar. I'm just not sure what the purpose was. We have Dumas' book already; recreating it in a fantasy world doesn't add much. And while I can forgive Dumas' style given its temporal distance, Brust doesn't have that excuse. He's stretched a very thin joke into a vast and unwelcoming journey in which the language is an obstacle that keeps you from admiring the scenery. It's one thing when that's an author's natural style (as with Lawrence Durrell), but another when the author can write well, but chooses cleverness over quality.I'd still like to know what happened in the middle volume, but I can't see subjecting myself to it any time soon. It's frustrating that Brust, clearly a talented and inventive writer, seems lately to have done so little with his skill - this extended linguistic joke, and the occasional formulaic extension of the Jhereg series. Where is the author of To Reign in Hell, Cowboy Feng's Bar and Grille, or even Brokedown Palace? Maybe at some point Brust will finish having his fun, stop coasting, and write something new. Roger Zelazny said "Watch Steven Brust." At his urging, I've been doing that, and for a while I enjoyed it. But I'm starting to wonder who took the original, and why they left this smirking jokester in his place.
REREAD (Oct 2014)Scoring bumped from 2 to 3 stars. It reads better as a consecutive run through the entire Khaavren Romance, but many of the criticisms below still hold true -- a sense of being rushed, a series of convenient deaths, and characterization sacrificed to getting the plot completed.======ORIGINAL REVIEW (Jun 2004)(Original review, scored on a 1-3 scale)Summary: [2] A wrap of the Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy, this novel concludes the tale of the reestablishment of the Dragaeran Empire after the Interregnum. Battles are fought, magical stuff happens, characters do things that we first heard hinted about in the Taltos novels, and some people end up dead, often with very little fanfare. The trilogy’s titular character — and, indeed, this novel’s titular character — do show up, but neither are the focus of the tale. The focus, in fact, seems to be getting to a conclusion.Entertainment: [2] The same breezy-yet-baroque style of the previous works continues here, though it feels increasingly rushed, as though Brust needed to get the remaining plot threads wrapped up and done with so he could move onto something else. I don’t know if he got tired of the conceit, or found himself painted into a corner, or simply had other things he needed to do, but compared to the initial books in the pentology (starting with The Phoenix Guard), the whole setup feels a little threadbare, capped by an odd epilogue I still haven’t quite puzzled out. The characterization for some of the folks is nearly lacking — some touching scenes between Khaavren and Piro aside, the players feel more like chess pieces moved around to make the story work than people driven by actual emotions. Even the Big Set o’ Deaths at the end feels more functional (having to figure out which people might show up in a future novel, or why we haven’t seen them in previous Taltos books) than there being much of a point to it. The basic idea of the series still works, but there’s not much there there, and it shows.Profundity: [2] People make decisions of honor that sometimes conflict. True love may, or may not, conquer all. Small decisions and happenstance can have tremendous effect. Brust doesn’t overdwell on these sorts of heroic lessons, but to be honest, he doesn’t dwell on much here at all.Re-readability: [2] Certainly it could be re-read, though it would need to be done as a collection of at least the trilogy, if not the pentology. It was, alas, a disappointing-enough wrap that I’m not sure how soon I’ll feel like doing so.
What do You think about Sethra Lavode (2005)?
This book completes the series of the Khaavren romances, Brust alternate take on Dumas adventures in his fantasy world. Unfortunately it goes off more with a whimper and a series of unnecessary deus ex machina.The impression that this book gives is that Brust wanted to finish the series at any cost, while setting up things to avoid collisions with the future tales he had already told. Unfortunately that brings short appeareances of the former main characters, and a severe mistreatment when they appear. Not the best ending at all for a series that would be best ended after Five hundred years later.
—Psychophant
It was an alright story with a very misleading title. Sethra Lavode is a very enigmatic and long-lived character in the Draegaran universe and so one might expect that book with her name as the title would deal with her as a central character and tell us something of her backstory. Not a chance, I think Sethra had more "screen time" in the first book of this series "Paths of the Dead"; a better title for this book probably would be "The Battle of Adrilankha" since most of the book revolves around the things preceding and going on during that battle.While I enjoyed this series for telling the backstory for a lot of the characters and events in the Draegaran universe, I found the plot cumbersome and the villains unconvincing.
—Chris King
The third volume of the third novel - or the fifth printed - roughly corresponding to "The Man in the Iron Mask" although it bears little resemblance to that novel other than some of the end results for the principal characters. This novel deals primarily with the Battle of Adrilankha and the final settling of the Orb on Zerika and not on Kana. I re-read this sequence as I had read them as they were published with gaps of 1 to 2 years between times and this really suffered for that. I enjoyed it much more this time when I was able to charge right through it as one should. Recommended if you have read the series from the start - however, if you didn't start with Phoenix Guards, please stop and go back there first as it won't make as much sense as if you had started from the beginning.
—Stuart Lutzenhiser
